Women’s Day: Danièle Huillet – A Moral Artist

At a time when the most reactionary currents of liberal identity politics, masquerading as progressives, are relentlessly trying to hijack and appropriate the radical struggles of the 20th century, from Combahee River Collective to Martin Luther King, from feminism to labor, it’s worth going back to one of that century’s preeminent artists and remembering the radical, anti-capitalist (hence anti-fascist) nature of a truly feminist cause. An artist for whom the intensity of a political commitment was as great as that of an artistic one. For whom the question of aesthetics was that of politics and vice versa—an artist of the highest order: a moral artist.

Arta Barzanji is a full-time cinephile and occasional filmmaker, critic, researcher, and translator based in Los Angeles. His current research focuses on the cinema of the Iranian filmmaker, Sohrab Shahid Saless. His translations include texts on Straub-Huillet to Farsi, and his writing consists of pieces on Shanghai Express and Satantango, as well as forthcoming pieces on Pedro Costa and Barabra Loden’s Wanda. Arta’s own films explore the relationship between the viewer and the screen while engaging with the works of filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Malcolm Le Grice.